My Answer to the Nine Dots Prompt, "Are Digital Technologies Making Politics Impossible:" -- “We Are the Unembraced: Technology Gave Us Captial P Politics, and Now It Takes It Away”

I submitted an entry for the Nine Dots Prize on their inaugural theme: "Are Digital Technologies Making Politics Impossible?"Looking at it now, months later, I am trying wayyyyyy too hard to squeeze way too much into the word count. The idea that mass media gave us a small window of "mass" politics in the middle of the 20th century which we now mourn the passing of is still something I think is interesting and correct. But I approach this question with a style that seesaws a bit too much from a casual lit review to quick pop culture references. In my defense, I could not tell whether they wanted a more or less academic text, even after researching the organization and the people behind it. If I were to do it again, I think I would choose more pop culture and less theory, but I write these words two hours before the prize winner is announced. We'll see if my prediction of what they want is true.Okay, the results were just announced. Looking at some excerpt's of winner James Williams' submission, it sounds like they wanted academic after all. Ah well, it is better to make a choice than try to do it all, as I did. If it's wrong, well, then, next time.So what you see below is a sandstone of approaches that may not, ultimately, be structurally sufficient. I hope to return to this idea in the future. In which case this post will stand as an early, failed form of these ideas. This is the core of writing: failing and then revising.________

“We Are
the Unembraced: Technology Gave Us Captial P Politics, and Now It Takes It
Away”

Politics
is impossible. Not the brute Laswellian mechanic of who gets what when why how.

What
has long been impossible is the inevitability of the embrace, the optimistic
Aristolean entelechial dream of the enormous, affirming group hug of
civilization. Aristotle suggests that such an outcome is logically inevitable,
as we might expect of a thinker fulsome with the sameness of his Athenian
tribe, here at the beginning of hisPoliticsand its dream, where he is three mere
paragraphs away from an insulting discourse differentiating women and slaves
and bees: “But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or
political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and
at the highest good.”

This
faith that goods are additive into a magic Emerald City polis is, as are so
many of Aristotle’sultimately cloistered
Aquinian faiths, cute. This faith is not simple. It involves conflict and
compromise, but it sees inevitable “harmony” resulting from that, unlike the
single beat or foot of music he critiques in Socrates’ political ideas in Book
Two. While he awaits the final swell of a Garlandian thematic reprise in Victor
Fleming’s musical, we live in a world of more complex harmonics.

Bernard
Crick, who has come to represent a battered postwar version of a faith in
the telos of politics, writes in an age in which the devil’s tritone has been
pulled from satanic dissonance into Baroque harmonies and bebop improvisation.
Unlike Aristotle, he sees political good as an axiological commitment, not an
ontological inevitability, embracing, as many did in a century of fascists,
political process as a bulwark against horror. 20thcentury dissonance, as in jazz,
resolves into something approaching harmony only with “tolerance and diversity”
for Crick.

Crick
understands that group hugs are awkward. They are work.

Although
Crick talks “compromise” fifty years ago, he really seems to be after what the
business school gurus will eventually call win-win problem solving. In a
compromise we both feel like we lose. And in a world where, asE.
J. Dionnewrites, we “hate
politics,” and, as polls continue to show, distrust it, so many seem willing to
Brexit and Trump their way past politics to something that looks an awful lot
like win-lose problem-solving, as they vote to protect their tribe, their
community, their family, their race, their dream, their illusion, their jobs,
their nostalgic picture of a better time.

So
much for the grand, “big tent” wins of the coalition-builders.

Does
that kind of politics no longer exist?

It
might be more prudent to ask if it ever existed.

Have
we abandoned the big tent group hug Emerald City major chord politics of
yesteryear in a digital stream of narrowcasting, fake news echo chambers and
unfollows? Or was Crick always peddling an illusion he knew we needed as a
motivator whilst Stalinism rose on ballistic plumes in the east and Blitzed
buildings went on to a second decade of unrepair?

Ah.
Now we’re talking rhetoric, another Aristotelan passion which Crick departs
from, unfortunately equating it with vapidity and sophistry, exactly the things
Plato wished to rescue it from, by, well, writing to defend “truth” in
dialogues where he made up dumb things for his sophisitic opponents to say
before they recognized that he was right, like classical age wish-fulfillment
fanfiction, complete with a “yes” at the end.

If
we are to suggest, for a moment, that Aristo-Crickian politics is impossible,
we are left with a definition of politics as the art of achieving the least-bad
outcome for your tribe. Big tent group hug coalitions happen when those
least-bad outcomes dovetail. Candidates win when they can narrowcast least-bads
to a governing preponderance of groups. Get out the vote is more reliable than
convincing the other side. Which sounds like a departure from a rhetoric that
might involve persuading someone who thinks differently than you do.

Instead,
we’ll shift past Aristotle’s rational, conscious, mental, calculation-heavy,
try-hard formula of the “use of the available means of persuasion in any given
case” to a post-FreudKenneth
Burke, who posits that persuasion happens via the magic of identification
in a quasi-mystical commingling. It is hard to say when it happens, which is
fair, as if you, reader, were to list all the times you changed your mind about
something important as an audience member, I imagine the list would be shorter
than that for your weekly groceries.

It
is a shift to the “you can’t not communicate” era of unconscious complexity
given to us by ethnographers of ritual likeGregory
Bateson, who suggests that our words and gestures sound a lot more like
animal noises, the very differentiator Aristotle used to justify his
entelechial faith at the beginning of hisPolitics.
For Bateson, people just kinda suck at information-processing. Most of what we
say is ritualized friendship messaging. We, like Democratic candidate Al Gore
in his AME church event, simply and awkwardly continually try to communicate
fealty. I am here. I care.

We
have, then, always lived in small echo chambers of friendship since we dropped
from the trees and needed another set of eyes to look for big cats.

Politics
and Rhetoric should not be separate books.

Does
Martin Luther King convince white America with his ideas, or does he simply use
enough religious code words to convince the Bible belt that he is part of that
tribe, asSelbyseems to suggest? Is social change the
result of cognitive dissonance in tribal identities as much as it is anything?

One
more moment for rational faith in rhetoric comes from the optimistically
monikered “new rhetoric” of postwar argument theory.Stephen
Toulminadds markers of
uncertainty and calculation to syllogistic reasoning, suggesting, for example,
that in a world of diverse audiences and complex knowledge, arguments have a
“modal” qualifier which signifies a level of certainty. Practical argument in
an uncertain world, I guess, requires us to diagram that the claim “Kanye West
is a genius,” is, even for its proponents, not at all meant with anything
approaching certainty.

Better
work in the new rhetorical school comes fromChaim Perelman and Lucie
Olbrechts-Tyteca, who catalog every form of argument they can find in a
rather exhaustive reading list of Western discourse. Perelman, who remembers
being unpersuaded, not believing the Holocaust was possible when first told of
it in his office in Belgium, is an enthusiastic student of the impediments to
persuasion. His catalog of argument spends more time stripping the logic out of
argument, calling it, at best, quasi-logical, a general form that looks like
math, maybe, perhaps, if you are bad at math and don’t really know much.

Perelman,
for example, finds that most argument seems to proceed from example or cause,
with more paradoxes and errors in both topoi than you’d think. He emphasizes
the impossibility of a universal audience to respond to the premises of
argument, which Toumlin, for his part, reduces from “major premise” to the
accurately and inevitably ambiguous notion of a “warrant,” which, like the legal
document, simply authorizes us to move to the claim, to the end, inside the
door to search for contraband. For Perelman, premises must be given “presence”
like “Caesar’s bloody tunic” and he spends the end of the book dithering into
how we more readily break philosophical pairings than build them.

All
of this adds to a world where reasoning, the kind of thing you’d need to
compromise, is fraught, mistaken and rare.

Sure.

We
return, again, to Aristotle. He suggests that there is such a thing as an enthymeme,
an incomplete argument. This could be a persuasive tool, as when you suggest
the two premises that have only one logical outcome and let the audience say it
themselves: “All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. So….?” But the dark side
enthymeme, which we would expect to be triumphant in a world beyond
Aristo-Crickian politics, is fantastically common. In this case we drop a piece
of evidence and barrel on to the claim, because, you know, we are preaching to
a narrowcasted choir. We rely on the old saws (loci, for Perelman) of our tribe
and expect them to be able to provide the chamber’s echo. When Fox News
suggests a candidate might raise taxes, for example, there is no need to remind
the tribal hordes of the major premise/warrant that “Taxes are bad.”

So
is technology free of the burden of its contribution to making this kind of
politics a dodgy business at best, the kind of thing that exists most clearly
in Aaron Sorkin programs and heavily-advanced political autobiographies? Are we
all choirs to our chosen preachers, clicking our ruby slippers to go home when
confronted with another opinion, whether we are on Facebook or in the donut
shop?

Not
entirely.

The
dream of technology, sinceHoward Rheingoldcoined the term “virtual community” in
books he wrote in the pre-web 90s with pictures of himself wearing pajama pants
on the back covers, was to foster connections of ideas. If you are a brony or
lover of bar graphs or Blue Note LPs or late 19thcentury US presidential facial hair or
long discussions of which Shoshtakovich symphonies count as art, the Internet
is the place for those conversations, as they usually don’t fly between frames
at the bowling alley. The unabashed optimism of the early days of the Internet
was that it meant that someone out there, somewhere, dug the same obscure shit
you did.

And
this isn’t new. Since even before Paul innovated new uses of a distributed
communication technology, the publicly performed letter, to expand and cement
an enormously successful tribal identity, the early Christian church, since
before Virgil piggybacked on the Homeric poetic invention of Troy to
remythologize Rome, since the beginnings of writing and song and myth, we use
communication technology to craft tribes.

Although
lazy enthymemes and choir-preaching are inevitable rhetorical habits in a world
built of communities and tribes, the act of seeking out, riskily, additional
connections with a new tribe based on a new interest or secret passion is
structurally different than the passive replication of the memes of your clan
over Sunday dinner or football halftime or happy hour.

That
kind of entry into a pre-internet irl wizarding world has so many nostalgic
paeans that it is hard to imagine 20thcentury popular culture without this
story: the smoky jazz club luring you with its horn riffs, the underground
record store smelling of pot, the surfers rolling in the swells after dawn, the
mysterious colors and textures of yarn on the craft store shelves, the nerds
fighting with swords in the park in the afternoon, the folded party flyer
you’re sure most people don’t know about, the hushed up Bible study in that 3rdfloor dorm room, the older kids
who hang out in the back of the comic book store with Crumb comics and quiet
when you walk by, the Tupperware party at the end of the cul-de-sac you finally
got an invite to, the like-minded political meeting at 6pm in the conference
room in the back of the library.

We
have always been, just a bit, the Gore Vidals of our lives, looking for what we
can archly appreciate as an inside joke, even though the rival 70s icon, George
Plimpton, autoethnographically finding a way todoeverything and then ruining it by
writing a tell-all, justsoundsmore real, even though the opposite
seems like the truth.

In
Internet makes the search for the smoky rooms easier, and it also makes it
easier to crowd out everything else. I’m looking at you, Tumblr.

So
it should make our tribal-style politics easier, too, while at the same time
reducing Crick’s axiological bridge-building.

Maybe.

But
was it really that hard before?

Or
have we just recently popped what felt like the new normal bubble of 20thcentury collective broadcasting, when
we all watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and Walter Cronkite crying when we
landed on the moon and all read the same papers that pretended we were all
duped by Welles’War of the
Worldsuntil we believed it
was true?

Was
the group hug moment of political life across the world a temporary function of
the big media monopoly bubble that lived on in our memories as the
way-it-should-be even if it was no longer the-way-it-is when theParamountdecision and new TV channels
Howard Bealed the media into market shares?

When
exactly, in fact, did this Technicolor dream of politics exist, this
foundational historic moment of better times, this Golden Age fallacy which, as
inBaudrillard,
is a simulacra, a vision of visions, a text of texts, a medium of media which
represents what we wish it was as much as anything else.

Politics
and education, even amongst academics who might know better, share this
tendency to believe that students and voters of the past were smarter, paid
more attention, and probably ate more fiber.

Giddens
suggests a reason for this pervasive Yellow-Brick Age fallacy in another
context, when he suggests that the complexities of modern life and its abstract
and expert structures, technologies and discourses which proliferate but which
we don’t get, induce both increased states of trust and faith in buildings and
vehicles and institutions and discourses which we don’t understand but which
require magical fealty in order to satisfice our ways though life and something
likeKroker’s
panicky concernat the lack
of the grounded Real that Baudrillard and other salty postmoderns keep swiping
out from under us. We wish for a simpler time while we enjoy all the channels
and apps. We don’t understand the simpler time either, the jazz tritones, how
Fallingwater’s cantilevers stay in the air, how three strips of Technicolor
come together into one film, whether or not TV pictures break apart into pieces
and fly through air over Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka hair, how the little
rectangles on the punch cards worked in the mainframes, what the difference was
between the superchargers and the turbochargers installed in the Pony cars that
boomer dads raced past Rydell High. But we all know someone who says they did,
even if they are just bullshitting us.

They
tell us that back in the day they could take apart their VW engine on the lawn
and have it working again by the end of the day but now mechanics work by
popping a thumbdrive dongle into the slot under the dash, which seems improper
even without the symbolic overtones. They tell us that back in the day the
polls were never surprised. They tell us that back in the day, as my
grandfather swore, thatGone
with the Windsomehow got
colorized later and everyone just lied about it.

We
know thatOzzie and HarrietandAnne
of Green GablesandUpstairs Downstairsand evenGodzillawere always already nostalgia bombs,
but we want to believe that bigPpolitics hasn’t always already been an
impossible game we built on the endorphinned memories of the war correspondents
who built the network news.

In
the 70s, Anselm Strauss was exploring the constant segmentation of our social
worlds across geographic and interest boundaries, with the inevitable battles
of legitimation and authenticity, and Dick Hebdige was exploring exploding
subcultures asStar Trekfans were finding ways to share
mimeographed erotic fan fiction via mail-order catalogs.

Technology
is the fever dream of unity, the CRT LCD glow of electrified human connection,
but the deep structure of that connection is the ham radio after midnight “Can
anyone hear me?” you drop after your callsign, or the phone number you found in
the back pages of the local free paper from the head which you call on your
Hayes Micromodem II to connect to a MUD, or the new local show about the surf
at your beach you found on a 3-digit channel on a cable box you didn’t know
went up that high, or the pimped-out MySpace page of the sweet new band your
friend from history class said the flute player in the marching band her cousin
was drum major for said was going to be the next big thing onTRL, or the new trending
subreddit that was the community that you always wanted to find but doubted
existed.

Politics
is the fever dream of humanity. But its deep structure is of people finding
their tribes and cooperating just enough to defend them.

Our
task is to study the textures by which technology and politics haunt each
other, structure and move each other while we burst the cynical histories that
suggest that something is, in fact, different about now. Every now feels like a
surprise, like a discontinuity with the mythology we have been weaving around
ourselves. That feeling, which feels like wisdom, is in fact the oldest
mistake. It is a grit of sand which we always seem to use to spitball ourselves
another pearl we can inevitably spit upon the shore of the new world on which
we will inevitably land, a beach of millions of grains of sand which always
seem to be just too much to swallow.

If
we study those textures, those eddies, those magical currents, those surprises,
if we can work through this history while resisting the lure of myth, if we can
turn to the technological rhetoric of politics, and if we can use this
different pearl-less faith, perhaps we can grab a more secure hold on the house
as its spins, one more time, through the twister. And when we leave our
yellow-bricked golden age behind, perhaps we can learn to love living as the
people behind the curtain, people who see the wizard on the screen as what he
really is, a flawed sideshow that still brings us all together.